Before they could start forming actual strategies, there was one pressing problem they needed to solve, or they would never get out of these caves alive.

Food.

They hadn't brought any with them, and there were no actual guarantees about how long they would be down here. All of them needed to eat, at least until they reached Embodiment. At that point, most of their biological necessities like breathing, eating, and even excreting waste would disappear, but none of them were close to achieving that.

Cat offered up a swift, efficient solution. She created a spectral worker and commanded it to find and prepare them food. In fact, she created several and sent them off. Within the hour, the strange-looking candlestick creations came back. One had a small lizard creature, about as long as Caeden's arm, grasped in its robotic claws. The others had different kinds of moss or mushrooms.

Before anyone could begin to worry about cooking, one of the workers bent over, lowering the green flame that constituted its head to the ground. The worker with the lizard began using its sharp pincers to efficiently gut and filet the creature. The other workers followed suit, quickly prepping their own foodstuff.

Seeing where this was going, Caeden turned Forged Infinity into a large shield and set it over the bent-over worker's flame. Without acknowledging his actions, the other specters laid their ingredients on the improvised cooking stone. It wasn't long before they had slices of lizard, mushrooms, and strangely meaty moss sizzling away under the careful gaze of the self-appointed chef worker.

This was one of the greatest benefits Cat's specters had. Somewhere in between her creating a specter and turning that creation into a mnemonic, they gained skills equivalent to Cat's vision of their abilities. Literally, if she wanted them to be skilled soldiers or archers, she willed that into their forms, and they gained those capabilities. It was a facet of her shroud unlike any other.

Any shroud could produce constructs from their raw manifested shroud. Some were more skilled than others, but anyone capable of using aura could do it. Furthermore, Both creature and object shrouds could produce living things. Object shrouds could endow whatever material their domain produced with life, essentially creating some variant of elemental. And obviously, creature shrouds were capable of creating living creatures within the bounds of their domain.

There were still limits to this, though. The elementals created by object shrouds could be compared to sophisticated machines. They could act independently of their creator, but only within a set series of guidelines. Whatever commands were imbued in them upon their creation were the limits of their sentience.

The animals or monsters produced by creature shrouds were limited in a different way. They always mimicked the capabilities of their natural counterparts. A creature shrouded could modify their creation to increase its latent intelligence, but they couldn't imbue the animal with skills it or they did not personally possess.

Cat's shroud ignored such limitations. She could basically pull knowledge and skills from the air and shove them into her construct creatures with seemingly no limitations. Her soldiers thought and acted with all the skill and knowledge of veteran warriors. Her archers were top-tier marksmen. And her workers had a plethora of knowledge and skills to fulfill any kind of utility purpose imaginable.

It wasn't a new revelation, and the team had discussed this abnormal quality at length and in-depth over the last several months. They even conducted experiments to see how outlandish her creations could get. The only real limitations they found were three.

First, Cat could not make specters that would disobey her commands. No matter what, they were always undyingly loyal to her. Second, the level of skill a specter could possess scaled with how much shroud she invested in its creation. Third, if Cat couldn't imagine how something would work, it didn't. She once created a specter with hundreds of limbs and eyes all placed randomly about its surface. Since she couldn't imagine how the poor abomination would move or fight, it flopped around on the ground uselessly until she discorperated it.

Caeden couldn't help but marvel at this odd quirk of his friend's shroud as they sat around eating plants and animals harvested by a construct that had found, caught, harvested, and prepared the meal, all while somehow knowing what plants and animals were and weren't poisonous. It was surprisingly good, considering the lack of any kind of seasoning and incredibly basic preparation. Cat could make some pretty good cooks.

Their meal only delayed further discussions for so long. After everyone was full, they all continued to sit on the bank of the underground lake, discussing how to proceed. The first topic they had to cover was their last fight. Caeden and Lily had only brought it up in passing, but it warranted further analysis.

Basically, the whole thing, from start to finish, had been a disaster of bad planning and poor coordination. Their mistakes began even before they entered the mines. None of them had considered the possibility of unexpected dangers, a level of overconfidence and blind ignorance that had nearly killed them. They hadn't brought Cat's bevy of weapons in with them, nor any kind of rations in case of a situation just like this. They had walked into a fight with opponents they had scant knowledge of with the bare minimum of equipment.

The fight itself was even worse. Admittedly, predicting the appearance of Ash Reapers, a rare monster by any regard that was much stronger than anything that should appear on this continent, didn't necessarily qualify as an oversight. No one could have reasonably predicted one would appear, let alone the endless hoard they had faced. Their response after the initial encounter was entirely their fault.

After the first one, it was eminently obvious that Cat was their only effective offense. This made their decision to move back into the tunnel they entered from a massive blunder. They had pigeon-holed themselves and limited Cat's attack options. Her specters' individual strength was unimpressive, only showing their true use in large numbers. So they decided to hide in the small tunnel instead of letting Cat flood every other tunnel with approaching monsters with as many soldiers as she could manage.

Worse than any of that was Erik. He had always had trouble curbing his mischievousness in serious situations and constantly underestimated threats to his and their lives. They had all known this. All of them accepted Erik and his quirkiness, appreciating the levity and genuine joy for living he brought into their lives. No one wanted Erik to become serious and dour all the time. But deliberately not using a skill that could potentially save their lives until he could create an 'epic reveal' was too far for any of them to tolerate.

Erik, to his credit, recognized his mistake. Once they had explained the glaring fault in his thinking, he had apologized unreservedly, offering no excuse. The problem was, Erik was just like that. He was goofy and uncontrollable, and sometimes thoughtless. Correcting that behavioral issue was not the work of a single instance.

Since none of them could crawl into Erik's head and make him understand, all they could do was clarify how much danger he had put them all in and how much none of them appreciated or accepted it. They were painfully clear. When it came to fighting for their lives, Erik could have no secrets, and he needed to treat every fight seriously. They would accept nothing else. If he couldn't get his act together, Caeden, Lily, and Cat wouldn't be fighting with him anymore. For all that he was their friend that they liked and appreciated, they couldn't accept the risk.

Following that, they worked for hours on strategy and application. All of them were intimately familiar with each other's abilities from the nightly training they did. At this point, everyone had fought everyone else dozens of times in multiple ways with different rules. They worked on varying their approaches and overcoming each other constantly.

The problem was, all of their training up to this point had been working to improve their skills as individuals. Taking those skills and meshing them into a group dynamic was immensely more complicated. The cursory efforts they had put into it up to this point were nowhere near enough to produce a functional team. So that was their focus. Taking all the disparate fighting styles and skills and working that into a cohesive whole, capable of far more than what they could do alone.

The discussion was mostly down to Caeden and Lily going back and forth, consulting the other two for input on their roles and how to mesh them in. After several hours, the only result was a simple one. They didn't know enough. These were all empty theories that required testing. They needed to fight with each other, put the ideas they had forged on metaphorical paper through real trials and tribulations, and see what broke and what worked.

It was time to fight more monsters.

{}

Caeden flopped down on the beach of their underground lake with a groan. They had been down here for a week. A week. No one had come and found them, which further reinforced Caeden and Lily's initial guess that the shaft they had entered through was not safe to travel. Multiple times, they had seen more debris fall through the hole and into the lake. It wasn't a stable tunnel.

This week had been a learning experience for all of them. The various tunnels of this ancient cave network were teeming with hundreds of monsters all over the place. They had encountered squads of Crystal Moles, working to reshape the tunnels and caves stretching for miles underneath Black Reach. It was an ever-shifting landscape of complicated passageways and massive caverns with dozens of exits and entrances leading all over.

Caeden had no doubt they would have gotten lost if not for Cat. Once again, her magical workers came in clutch. The little things had a level of memory and spatial awareness unparalleled. They never got lost or confused, no matter how far the group traveled from the underground reservoir that had become their base of operations.

The beach they had taken as their temporary home had been changed as well. Between Caeden's Sharp shroud and Cat's workers, they had managed to take the small beach that barely even qualified for the term and expanded it into a larger open area. More rock carving with Sharp had produced stone implements for cooking and eating. Erik had shown some skill, turning moss into bedding and blankets. Stitch was perfectly suited for the task.

Lily had contributed in her own way. Experimentation with Cloud and drawing some inspiration from Jared and his use of Powder allowed her to begin producing clouds of various materials. She mostly created small clouds of various spices to vary their meals and clouds of drinks that she used Ice to condense. It was surprising how much the desire for a more varied diet had inspired new applications of their abilities.

Their forays into the tunnel system around them had been…trying. The majority of monsters down here were at or below their IP, with more Ash Reapers being a notable exception. Normally they wouldn't be a challenge to deal with. Problems arose from the tight confines and high numbers.

Whenever they were in tunnels, the limited space proved challenging for everyone. When they were in the open space of the vast caverns the tunnels connected, they were beset on all sides by dozens of monsters. It was hard to say which situation was more taxing, but they all agreed that both sucked.

Battle tactics had been taken up and abandoned in equal measure. Anything that didn't work was ruthlessly excised from their strategy as the pressure of combat revealed every weakness they had. The improvements weren't just to their efficacy as a team. Everyone found parts of their abilities and combat styles that didn't work in real-world conditions. Finally, after a week of constant fighting for hours a day, they had shaved off much of the fat.

Out of all the formations they had tried and tested, one appeared as the most effective. The team now focused around the unit of Cat and Caeden. In the tight tunnels, Cat's spectral pegasus was no help in increasing her evasion, making Cat easily the most vulnerable team member with no recourse. Caeden stepped up as the group's tank. He was big and flashy and powerful enough that no monster could outright ignore him.

So, with Cat staying a safe distance behind Caeden and him daring every monster they encountered to try and bite his golden face off, Erik and Lily became the most annoying duo in existence. Erik's Stitch bindings had been supplemented by Lily's newest skill. She would formshift into a cloud of some soporific or poisonous material like chloroform or chlorine and fly into the face or breathing orifice of whatever monster faced them.

When the monster was suitably limited by poison or bindings or both, everyone went to work laying on the damage. This often proved difficult. Monsters were each diverse and unique enough to negate or limit at least one or two main abilities from each of them. Adaptability and communication became their bread and butter. Many times they encountered a new, ancient monster that had lived in these depths for untold centuries with odd powers. Only rapid response, careful control, and mutual trust in each other's competence had allowed them to pull through without major injuries.

Erik had managed to mollify and overcome the mistrust he had created with his thoughtless, reckless actions. He had approached their situation with a seriousness he had previously reserved for his medical pursuits. Whenever they got back to base, his goofiness returned in force, but he had obviously taken their warning to heart.

Improvements on a group scale hadn't just honed their already robust trust in each other. It had forged them into something entirely different, ready to fight in ways they would have never dreamed. Caeden let out a sigh, hearing Lily laugh at some dumb joke from Erik as she threw clouds of spice over sizzling strips of lizard meat set onto a rock positioned over a spectral worker.

For all the danger and uncertainty around them, he was happy.